如何使用 zgrep 在与给定文件名模式匹配的存档文件中查找内容？

Question

Suppose I have two tar.gz files

a1.tar.gz
a2.tar.gz

and each archive contains many files, including a file called

target.txt

How do I search for BLAH in target.txt in both of these archives using zgrep without searching all of the other files in each archive?

If I try

zgrep -a BLAH *.tar.gz

then that searches all files in each archive, and if I try

zgrep --include=target.txt -a BLAH *.tar.gz

then I get

zgrep: --include=target.txt: option not supported

Answer 1

You can use zgrep , however this command will not locate the file you are looking for as it searches the entire tar-formatted file for matches. This will report which tar file has a match for BLAH but this does not limit searching tar files containing the file target.txt .

There is an open source tool called ugrep to search archives (zip, tar, pax, cpio, jar) and tar.gz tarballs. Use option -z and -g target.txt to search for BLAH in target.txt in all of the tar files found recursively:

ugrep -z "BLAH" -g target.txt

To search the working directory only without recursing deeper:

ugrep -z "BLAH" -g target.txt .

Note that option -g takes a glob. Use a quoted glob like -g "*.txt" to match all .txt files.